AGC Inc. announced in its Medium-term Management Plan that the company intends to seriously develop glass core substrates for next-generation semiconductor packages. Accordingly, the company plans to start implementation before 2030.

The company aims to develop glass substrates, which are gaining traction to address the limits of miniaturization. Particularly, the company will leverage on the strength of its proprietary materials and hole drilling technology.

In semiconductors, efforts toward miniaturization processing are advancing with EUV and other technologies. However, it has been pointed out that conventional technologies have limitations when moving further from the cutting-edge 2nm node.

For that reason, Intel Corporation announced in 2023 that it will develop glass substrate technology for the packages for chiplets. Other efforts are also attracting attention.

Leverages on Know-How

Glass substrates have several promising attributes. Particularly, rigidity, micro-and high-precision hole processing, low loss, flatness, and smoothness are among the obvious qualities. Moreover, thermal and mechanical shape stability and insulation are another compelling quality of glass substrates.

AGC has been conducting R&D in this field for some time and has cultivated technologies in EUV-related and other fields. Specifically, the company has been refining its technology for fine, high-precision hole drilling (hole processability) for more than 10 years. Furthermore, the company believes that its commercial products, such as special glass for electronics applications, which are different from conventional glass, differentiate it from the competition. Thus, they consider it as a strength of the company.

The company expects that the market for large data centers and other facilities will increase due to the spread of AI. The company believes that glass substrates will be introduced in the latter half of the 2020s.

AGC aims to realize further integration and higher performance of semiconductors. Moreover, the market size is tremendous and has the potential to become a large-scale business.

-14 March 2024-